Reply #184: "After Milwaukee"

[Gormy Cuss]

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/after-milwaukee

After Milwaukee

By Frederick M. Hess Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Nearly two decades have passed since the enactment of the landmark Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by the Wisconsin legislature. The program and its many supporters had hoped this experiment in school choice would lead the way in transforming American schools. But it is by now clear that aggressive reforms to bring market principles to American education have failed to live up to their billing.
(snip)
Yet things have not worked out as intended. Chester Finn Jr., chair of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education and a champion of choice-based reform since the 1980s, has voiced “growing sympathy” with choice skeptics and warned against “too much trust in market forces.”

Even staunch proponents of school choice are conceding disappointment. Earlier this year, Weekly Standard contributor Daniel Casse reported, “The two most recent studies show that, since the implementation of the voucher program, reading scores across all Milwaukee schools are falling.” Howard Fuller, patron saint of the voucher program, has wryly acknowledged, “I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn’t been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS that we would have thought.”

Remember that AEI and Hoover are the kinds of institutes that one would expect to support market based models.